nd in their silent faces did he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none
Nor any voice of joy. His spirit drank
The spectacle; sensation, soul and form
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live; they were his life.

There are people who find little satisfaction in Wordsworth. His
reputation is a puzzle to them. They look for fine passages and too
rarely discover them. They judge him by the test of mere brilliance of
language, not by the higher and truer poetic gift, the power of seeing
"into the life of things," the power and exquisite feeling whereby
outward facts are brought to serve as inward forces.

And, quite apart from this function as the receiver of impressions and
the communicator of them; quite apart from the function of the poet as
moral and spiritual teacher working side by side with that teacher of
facts, the man of science, there is room, and will always be room, for
the artist-poet who simply refreshes and entertains. For poetry lies
also in epics and romances, in "feigned history" and descriptions, when
the poet, as Longinus says, "by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary
emotion of the soul," makes it seem to us that we behold those things
which he paints--a feat which he performs through his gift of
imagination, whereby he bodies forth the shapes of things unknown and
gives to airy nothings of beauty and delight and pathos a local
habitation and a name. The world of the future will find refreshment in
such creations no less than the world of the present. We know that
romantic novels are unreal, but we read them with keen enjoyment none
the less. So those romantic poems the _Idylls of the King_ and _The
Earthly Paradise_, like _The Tempest_, or the _Faerie Queene_, though
they cause us no real illusion as to fact, nevertheless absorb our
interest, and charm us with their unliteral beauties. We know in our
hearts that there is no magic and no fairyland. But it is a pitiably
dull and mollusc mind which finds no delight in peering through those

Charm'd magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.

There remains, then, this function too of the poet who gives "exquisite
expression" to an "exquisite impression"--the function of entertaining
us nobly with tender thought and touching story, embodied in words of
beauty, and graced with melodious cadences. Of such sort is the writer
of the _Earthly